Tesla Wants To Make Every Home a Distributed Power Plant (techcrunch.com) 155
Tesla CEO Elon Musk wants to turn every home into a distributed power plant that would generate, store and even deliver energy back into the electricity grid, all using the company's products. TechCrunch reports: While the company has been selling solar and energy storage products for years, a new company policy to only sell solar coupled with the energy storage products, along with Musk's comments Monday, reveal a strategy that aims to scale these businesses by appealing to utilities. "This is a prosperous future both for Tesla and for the utilities," he said. "If this is not done, the utilities will fail to serve their customers. They won't be able to do it," Musk said during an investor call, noting the rolling blackouts in California last summer and the more recent grid failure in Texas as evidence that grid reliability has become a bigger concern.
Last week, the company changed its website to prevent customers from only buying solar or its Powerwall energy storage product and instead required purchasing a system. Musk later announced the move in a tweet, stating "solar power will feed exclusively to Powerwall" and that "Powerwall will interface only between utility meter and house main breaker panel, enabling super simple install and seamless whole house backup during utility dropouts." Musk's pitch is that the grid would need more power lines, more power plants and larger substations to fully decarbonize using renewables plus storage. Distributed residential systems -- of course using Tesla products -- would provide a better path, in Musk's view. His claim has been backed up in part by recent studies from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which found that the U.S. can reach a zero-carbon grid by more than doubling its transmission capacity, and another from Princeton University showing that the country may need to triple its transmission systems by 2050 to reach net-zero emissions.
Last week, the company changed its website to prevent customers from only buying solar or its Powerwall energy storage product and instead required purchasing a system. Musk later announced the move in a tweet, stating "solar power will feed exclusively to Powerwall" and that "Powerwall will interface only between utility meter and house main breaker panel, enabling super simple install and seamless whole house backup during utility dropouts." Musk's pitch is that the grid would need more power lines, more power plants and larger substations to fully decarbonize using renewables plus storage. Distributed residential systems -- of course using Tesla products -- would provide a better path, in Musk's view. His claim has been backed up in part by recent studies from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which found that the U.S. can reach a zero-carbon grid by more than doubling its transmission capacity, and another from Princeton University showing that the country may need to triple its transmission systems by 2050 to reach net-zero emissions.
Distributed is the future (Score:5, Insightful)
A future in where every home and building is a tiny solar power plant producing excess energy is where it all comes together. Then make sure the grids are connected properly where when things like the Texas snowpacalypse happens, other areas can share their excess to keep things leveled out. Batteries either at each home or at the neighborhood level can take you through the night and storms.
Re:Distributed is the future (Score:5, Insightful)
But be prepared for the system operator to tell you "No. We don't need your power right now." When the system has excess capacity, not everyone can sell their stored power back. And if that adversely affects your ROI, welcome to the world where the adults play and have been doing so for years.
ROI hardly matters (Score:3, Insightful)
And if that adversely affects your ROI,
ROI is nothing compared to the value of self-sufficiency in generating most of your own power most (or all) of the time...
The ROI just helps make it practical for more people.
Re:ROI hardly matters (Score:4, Insightful)
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The vast majority of people don't give a shit about self-sufficiency
Really? Run a poll in Texas and California and get back to me on that.
Re:ROI hardly matters (Score:5, Interesting)
Even if I went completely disconnected, it still pays for itself in under a decade, and performance is warranted for 25 years. It really is a no-brainer. Even if you finance it, it still is worth it because of the lack of your own power bill, never mind anyone else's compensation.
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If they have targets for "green energy" (from regenerable sources), then power you provide from a solar system will help them in that regard too. ...).
(Europe has this "green electricity" thing, I get every year a letter detailing the consumption percentage by source of electricity - wind, hydro, nuclear,
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Citation needed. Transmission is considered inefficient when it consumes 10%, nevermind 33%.
In fact, according to this, Cal
Re: ROI hardly matters (Score:2)
Re:ROI hardly matters (Score:5, Informative)
Ok, in the very same survey, ask how many of those people already have a solar+battery system, or have already put a deposit on order and installing soon. California rolling blackouts have been going on for years, Tesla has been selling their powerwall for few years, you must think most Californians already have a Tesla solar+battery installed, right?
A backup generator is much cheaper than the Tesla solar setup. Tesla setup for 20KW solar with storage, well over $100K, natural gas/LP 20KW generator with automatic transfer box, $5K at Costco. Installation and maintenance is extra on both setups, with solar costing more too. I went through that exercise few yeas back. At the time I was big Tesla fan, (I still have 2 Model S today) but still couldn't justify the cost, so installed a generator, runs great a few times a year I need it. Funny thing, switching both of our cars to Tesla and a rare 8 hr power outage was what motivated me to put in the generator. I can run the whole house and charge both EV's up overnight (slower charging than usual, but sufficient for overnight charging). Yea, all computerized electronics at the house need to be on a UPS (generator kicks in after 30 seconds), but that's still much cheaper than a full Tesla solar+battery setup.
PS> Given Elon's statement that their setup HAS TO go between the grid and the house, I'd need 48KW setup to match the current utility service.
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Thank you for the detail. I can see that Elons vision to take the planet green, is happening about as quickly as a Model S Plaid in every garage. Not exactly your Model T price tag.
And of course the critics will claim that your $5K Costco setup won't generate power back, but it takes a long damn time to make up for a $100K+ premium. That's 30 years of $300/month electric bills. Considering the investment power of $100K over 30 years, it kind of seems like an insane waste of money if all you're looking f
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Re:ROI hardly matters (Score:5, Informative)
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"No. We don't need your power right now."
And when they're begging for power, you can set your sell price too, right?
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Well, in markets it is currently like that, but automatically.
Like in my case I get hour by hour variable price for both bought and sold electricity based on the market price that hour.
The price has never been negative value so far, but that has happened a few times in Germany when there is a windy, warm weekend day.
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Re:Distributed is the future of fantasy (Score:2)
Nice fantasy. Nope. Price to purchase from super small power suppliers like homes will be fixed and less than market value.
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Well, not in my case at least.
I get the same price as everyone else in the system big or small and it is variable based on the need with the price changing on hourly basis.
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That's fine, that's what storage is for.
And if you're making it out of used EV batteries, then the costs are quite reasonable.
Then you sell the stored power when they actually do need it, and preserve your ROI.
Not to mention, if we have a bunch of excess cheap power available at some particular time, then someone will come up with an industry which consumes it, enabled by that cheap power. There are a number of industrial processes which can run intermittently.
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But be prepared for the system operator to tell you "No. We don't need your power right now." When the system has excess capacity, not everyone can sell their stored power back. And if that adversely affects your ROI, welcome to the world where the adults play and have been doing so for years.
Not only that, but the system operator will need a way to disconnect / reconnect multiple solar units at once in order to manage the grid. Lots of little power source putting a MW or 2 into the grid will be a pain to try to manage. I can see where ISO's may simply leave them disconnected except when there is a need for power beyond what is available from generating stations, so even if a location is using less than it is capable of generating it will either charge the battery or need to reduce its output.
Re:Distributed is the future (Score:4, Interesting)
...Hell they could supply the grid battery for free and pay you for the electricity surplus you provide it, beyond the storage capacity of your house supply batteries. They then control the flow of electricity from their grid battery to the grid, to maximise returns for them.
Pay you? That's a cutesy way of selling this idea.
Tesla will put themselves in the middle of you and the electric company "for free", while basically becoming the electric company and charging you whatever the hell they want for power, while they negotiate pennies with the electric company they're starving out of picture, and keep 100% of your supplemental power generation.
The only thing you will own, is an electric bill that you hope is cheaper in the long run. Not like you can switch providers when that introductory price runs out.
This also confirms that no matter how green the solution is, and no matter how cool your CEO is on Twitter, every consumer good benefits from competition.
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Distributed power plants are less efficient (compare a coal smokestack to the equivalent tailpipes.
The Grid has real issues transmitting power sufficiently far without loss. This loss can be overcome more easily by a few massive generators than numerous peer-to-peer generators.
In the snowpacalypse we saw a bunch of independent entities (power plants) all fail for the same underlying cause. It's not clear that numerous identical solar panels wouldn't succeed and fail at the same time.
The problem with the s
Re: Distributed is the future (Score:2)
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Point two is that you need to have the huge power plants' output to overcome huge transmission losses. Think a Tesla coil powered off a wall outlet vs. 1,000 tesla coils powered off AA batteries.
Point four was that the Texas communities attached to the US grids (yes, I left off the "s") did well. There were multiple communities (and they were on the eastern and western grids) that did well. The point is there are other solutions that actually work to increase reliability.
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Describing a 5% loss [eia.gov] as "huge" seems an exaggeration to me.
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Further, utility companies not concerning themselves with power generation
This might one day be feasible, but right now, I don't think this is even possible, let alone feasible.
I spent about a new cars worth of money to just cover my roof with solar, with no energy storage. So I depend on the grid to get me through the night and cloudy weather and further my total generation is less than my demand some months. I happen to have a house aligned with the back of my roof perfectly facing the sun. A lot of houses aren't so favorably aligned, and the angle of panels and number of pa
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It's not clear that numerous identical solar panels wouldn't succeed and fail at the same time.
Maybe they could use some kind of battery on the wall...a powerwall, maybe, to store generated power for later.
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If that was the case, there wouldn't need to be a grid. The point of the grid is to allow transmission of spot power.
But local battery storage is pretty inefficient compared to centralized storage.
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If your home is more efficient, you save money and/or make money from retransmission. If the grid is more efficient, power companies gain profit. It's not always bad on a practical level to do things less efficiently.
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If solar roofs become super popular, you're not going to make money from retransmission. In some places in Australia, just having retransmission turned on is a net cost (negative income) because they don't want solar when you can produce it.
The scales of efficiency are different enough it make sense to outsource the generation/storage to centralized location, even if they make a profit.
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It's not just about them making a profit, it's about you not paying more. If you have solar stored in a battery, you can use it during peak periods or for localized outages.
Retransmission is something that should be able to be remotely requested. Set a bid and then if the demand reaches your set price, they can tell your device to start pushing power out. Spot power while adjusting base load generation is probably the only thing that would be profitable to you personally. But you would see no savings if
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That's my point. It's cheaper to have a communal energy storage system and have everyone pay their share (plus extra so they can profit) than for everyone to have a powerwall. Plus you can do things like move from batteries to pumpng water uphill
The grid doesn't work on point-to-point bids like that. Power generators click on or off on a scale of days, not minutes.
Re: Distributed is the future (Score:2)
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I was only accepting this as fact for the sake of argument, but I can't say for sure. I'd expect that large scale would only be as efficient if it was simply more batteries. Having it distributed might actually make it more efficient because it can be localized to where the need is.
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Most home solar systems won't feed back into the grid when grid power fails. This is done deliberately to prevent safety issues when repairs have to be done on grid equipment.
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Distributed power plants are less efficient (compare a coal smokestack to the equivalent tailpipes.
Not all power plants are created equally. A solar power system's efficiency does not depend at all on its size. As such, your objection does not apply at all to solar power.
The Grid has real issues transmitting power sufficiently far without loss. This loss can be overcome more easily by a few massive generators than numerous peer-to-peer generators.
That is not how this works. AT ALL. Grid load is reduced by small-scale, point-of-use generation. However much power you produce locally is removed from the amount of power that has to be transmitted across the grid. Also, however much power the grid can carry in one direction, it can carry that much power in the other direction as well.
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People have no idea of the numbers involved.
I said right in my comment that I made up the number for convenience. If you don't read comments, you're going to make irrelevant responses to them at best.
The numbers are irrelevant to the theory of operation, which is why I didn't put any thought into what they should actually be.
The fact that you focused on an irrelevance instead of making a meaningful response suggests that you know your argument is nonsensical.
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The numbers do not matter to the point being made.
When you learn to read, go back and look at the comment in question.
Re: Distributed is the future (Score:2)
How big is your neighborhood? 4 houses
Eight off the local transformer. Which is why Seattle trying to switch from gas to electric heat is going to be a shit-show. Enjoy watching hundreds of miles of underground service lines being dug up and replaced.
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The only upside for the heat half of the year is you can overload the transformer more when it is cold out.
Knowing a few people who have already made the gas to electric switch, the preferred type is most often a heat pump (we have mild winters, so high delta T inefficiency isn't an issue here). And once they get their heat pump, many will switch it over to air conditioning on one of our few hot days.
Drive down the road where the power lines are overhead and you can already see the scorched paint jobs on the pole pigs (transformers) from running well beyond their rating.
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First, you assume PV solar instead of CSP solar. No one has household CSP. And that's like saying a bunch of servers spread throughout your office are more efficient than your server room (better airflow! other reasons!). Even if true, it increases maintence costs.
You're assuming that I'm transmitting to no one (myself) or to my next door neighbor. Duh, that's efficient, bec
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Distributed power plants are less efficient (compare a coal smokestack to the equivalent tailpipes.
This really depends on the technology. This isn't so true for solar, but is for wind and fossil fuels. Though one could make the argument repairing a centralized solar plant after a hurricane might be more feasible than repairing a bunch of rooftop solar, though that much residential damage would not be merely a matter of energy generation..
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It only pays off if a lot of people don't outlay the capital. If everyone has a powerwall, there are no "nighttime" rates or "daytime" rates anymore. AT least not different enough ones to pay for your wall.
Besides, it's far more efficient for power companies to outlay huge amounts for huge storage solutions, and divide that cost among their customers. Even with their profit, economies of scale should work better evenin
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When the snowpacalypse happens and you have a full battery, you flip the main breaker to disconnect yourself from the grid to save your own.
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For that to be feasible for me, Panels need to be about 30% efficient.
I currently have my roof covered with ~20% and come up short a bit in winter and summer. This is without an electric car to charge up.
I agree it's a nice goal, but the tech has a way to go before it can keep up with suburban residential demand. Apartments and commercial buildings are even more challenged.
What will happen to all the batteries? (Score:2, Interesting)
While this article [bbc.com] discusses the numerous issues with recycling electric car batteries, as opposed to regular car batteries, the same question should be asked in this situation. What happens to all those batteries installed in houses? Once their useful life is over, how much will it cost to replace them and what happens when they're taken away? Who, if anyone, will recycle them?
Or will they be chucked into some hole in the ground and left to rot for eons? What about all the energy involved to extract and
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Perhaps one of the founders of Tesla might step up? [reuters.com]
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Well, lead acid batteries are already 90% recycled [illinois.edu], so I really don't see it becoming an issue.
The real downside to this is it will be yet another aspect of home ownership where you've got a major thing in your house that is really expensive when it goes kaput. I work in the HVAC industry and most people shit a brick over the sticker shock from a new air conditioning/heat pump system. That's the farce when it comes to getting an ROI on all this "green" tech. The upfront cost is high and by the time you'v
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Re:What will happen to all the batteries? (Score:5, Interesting)
This is the biggest problem, most people envision free energy forever and forget to allocate the savings as future investment. I am a Power System engineer and over the past 20 years have regularly been asked to give advise to friends and family with regards to installing solar systems. The biggest reoccuring cost is battery replacement systems rapidly deteriorate after a certain amount of time, and also are very sensitive to temperature. This is all fine if you make sure you put assisde a few hundred dollars each year in preparation for the replacement but a lot of people fail to do this.
Really the best solution isn't a homeowner solution but a community implemented solution. That way they can pool resources, have a committee to manage expenditure and levy fees and organise regular inspections and maintenance.
The biggest downside to being an engineer is realising that everything is in a constant state of decay and it requires real effort on behalf of society to keep everything running smoothly. I wish i could go back to being innocent and thinking everything was great :). On a positive note I am very certain we have the technology to improve society for the future, and if you want to go down the rabbit hole try looking into virtual inertia.
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Only 5% of Lithium batteries are recycled now.
https://www.bbc.com/news/busin... [bbc.com]
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What happens to all those batteries installed in houses? Once their useful life is over, how much will it cost to replace them and what happens when they're taken away? Who, if anyone, will recycle them?
There are battery recyclers already, including Tesla. As more batteries stack up to be recycled, it will be worth more money to go into recycling, and there will be more battery recyclers.
Not everything is either recyclable or, more importantly, easy and cost effective to recycle. Look at the issue of getting people to recycle glass bottles and aluminum cans.
Recycling glass bottles is stupid. We should be reusing them, like we used to. Recycling them costs just as much as making new bottles, which is why nobody wants to do it. Recycling aluminum cans makes sense, though, and it's easy to make people do it. Just charge a meaningful deposit.
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While this article [bbc.com] discusses the numerous issues with recycling electric car batteries, as opposed to regular car batteries, the same question should be asked in this situation. What happens to all those batteries installed in houses? Once their useful life is over, how much will it cost to replace them and what happens when they're taken away? Who, if anyone, will recycle them?
For this to make environmental sense the cost of recycling should be included in the price; with the amount put in a trust and paid out to whoever recycles them. Ideally, the batteries would be designed for recycling to keep the costs, and thus purchase price down, and the batteries actually be recyclable. I'm sure we'll see that when we see a $10K Tesla...
Not sure about solar/Powerwall, but (Score:2)
Not sure about solar/Powerwall, but ...
If you had several million electric cars connected to the grid, their high-capacity batteries could be the ultimate grid-balancer.
Yes, I'm aware that there are all kinds of objections that can be made to the details, but the general principle is sound, surely? Could (say) 10 million electric car batteries plugged in at any given time cover the demand for power at peak times in the US?
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Peak power tends to be in the afternoon when most everyone has their car at work.
Which is exactly why you need storage.
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It’s a nightmare getting just one or two electric installs in parking lots
It was a nightmare to get sufficient charging stations to make long journeys in an EV practical. And yet it happened: automakers investing in the infrastructure drectly (Tesla) or indirectly by supporting 3rd party networks (as happened in much of Europe), or other companies seeing a potentially lucrative market. It was also a nightmare to get enough public charging points for people without a driveway... and yet that also happened, through private companies, city councils, or a combination. There was so
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See, that's the kind of detail that I was referring to :)
The average US household has 1.97 vehicles, and we don't need both of them parked outside the house during the afternoon. An average of 1 or 0.5 would suffice. If we have reached the stage where 10%-20% of US vehicles are electrically powered, the issue of "getting electric installs" WILL be solved one way or another. If having an electric install adds a couple of percent to the value of a house, you'd better believe that every house builder and every existing landlord will be desperate to add them.
The problem is the average US households have close to two workers, especially true for those who could afford electrics. So it’s more like an average of 0.5 to 0. Further, without a way to charge during the day, unless you have a short commute the time at home is going to be spent putting energy back in instead of having excess to put out. Maybe, instead of spending so many terrawatt hours driving two electrics to work (remember a major part of lifetime emissions is manufacturing, can be up to
I like it (Score:2)
Less peak capacity required, as the network can store excess during the low load times for the high load times. In turn, less line transmission capacity required, because you're evening out the load.
As long as I can be a selfish bastard and disconnect from the grid in a major blackout event to keep my own home going, I'm OK with it.
And of course, it'd be nice if Musk wasn't the only player.
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And of course, it'd be nice if Musk wasn't the only player.
we need anticompetitive laws enforcing universal service and interchangeability. Solar and batteries in homes are great, but each company locking out all competition is not something that can be tolerated in a utility. For example, the rate a utility pays a Tesla power wall for selling back power needs to be the exact same for any competitors in the same area at the same time. Imagine if ford gas stations refused to sell gas to chevys to try and put them out of business because that’s where we are
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Where did you get the idea that they would be different?
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Sub-optimal on an individual basis. (Score:2)
For my setup, if I added a battery, I would not want to charge the battery from the solar system. Instead, the best option would be to pull electricity from the grid at night, when I get the cheapest rate and then sell back to the grid late afternoon/early evening, when rates are highest.
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I get a flat rate 24 hrs a day, so I'd want to charge in the afternoon and use it in the early evening. Once depleted I'd never want to charge from the grid, because it would be extra wear on the batteries for no financial gain.
This sort of setup really needs to be flexible to the needs of the household.
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There are 3 scenarios when adding a battery makes financial sense:
1. Extreme differences in electricity pricing at different times per day.
2. Low feed-in tariff.
3. Unreliable grid (depending on how much lost power costs you).
Here, in CA, with my optimum setup, I have reason 1. At night, my rate is approximately 13c/kWh and in summer afternoons, it is over 54c/kWh. This provides an opportunity for a time-based arbitrage. Buy at night and sell back during the day (my house is grandfathered into a plan that pa
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That makes no sense, assuming you are charged something for overnight supply, even if it's a small something. Once you have solar panels, the electricity from them is effectively free.
Right now batteries make no sense either. And I say that as an owner of a house battery. I used to be charged AUD$0.24/kWh for electricity I bought from the grid, AUD$0.15 / kWh for elect
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You miss the lost opportunity cost of selling at the peak rate.
My setup requires buying electricity at some times and selling back to the grid at others. I won't go into the details, but maximum arbitrage is achieved in the scenario I gave.
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AUD$10,000 for 6 kWh
Prices have already fallen dramatically since then.
https://www.itstechnologies.sh... [itstechnologies.shop]
£892 each. Two of those, AUD$3500 (assuming 10% sales tax). Brackets and such add a little more, but on the other hand you get at least 500Wh more usable capacity (assuming the 6kWh in your system are 100% usable).
If my example is anything to go by, they need to drop by a factor of 5.
They have already dropped almost a factor of 3.
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Probably like this: everyone does as you say. Suddenly nighttime demand is as high if not higher than daytime. Power companies raise nighttime rates.
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Uh huh. And you don't think electric power companies wouldn't think of this and find some way to prevent you from making a profit off them like that? Probably like this: everyone does as you say. Suddenly nighttime demand is as high if not higher than daytime. Power companies raise nighttime rates.
Not only that, but no doubt will push public service commissions to set buy back rates as low as possible and to refuse to buy back.
This is already happening in South Australia (Score:5, Interesting)
Edison lost (Score:2)
A commercially operated solar farm can leverage economies of scale with more efficient sun tracking, plant controllers and professional monitoring and maintenance.
Current off-grid home setups are more expensive and resource intensive than grid power when you fully account for costs of panels, charge controllers, inverters, batteries and associated installation and maintenance costs.
Decentralization to residence level does not make sense for most people.
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Overall efficiency might be worse, but you would care more about how the efficiency benefits yourself. If the big provider gains efficiencies, they get a bigger profit. If I am relatively inefficient but partially self-sufficient, I get the savings.
Tesla has already achieved incredible success ... (Score:5, Interesting)
The program called for 50,000 homes to be equipped with home batteries, all linked wirelessly and managed by Tesla. That project had been completed 2%, or about 1000 homes when a coal fired power plant ( Queensland’s Kogan Creek coal power station ) tripped and went off line. The load was high and the grid frequency started dropping. Such a severe disruption would have taken the grid down and large parts of the grid would be dropped (called load shedding) without notice. Operators would bring them all back on line slowly section by section costing several million dollars.
But, like the little engine that could, that tiny 2% complete distributed "virtual" power station kicked in, kept the grid up, till additional power was brought on line and thus averted disaster.
So do not discount or disparage the batteries. The utility scale batteries we are talking about are of the order of 350 MW x 4 hours and such like. Not minutes or seconds.
Citation provided [teslarati.com]
Not quite... (Score:2)
Needs more than solar (Score:2)
Since the sun don't shine at night.
and nights are long in winter.
And I don't think people will be putting up their own windmills.
Delusions of Power (Score:2)
Delusions of power seem to be limiting Elon's sight a bit I think.
I would certainly hope he understands there is no way on Earth he'll be allowed to be the sole provider of this miracle.
He'll have to share the spoils if he wants to play the game. This means other vendors selling their own solar cells, batteries
or entire systems.
It should be an amusing thing to watch unfold.
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I would certainly hope he understands there is no way on Earth he'll be allowed to be the sole provider of this miracle.
Elon surely understands well that he's not the only game in town. On the other hand, he does have a big advantage over others due to simple name recognition.
Not enough lithium in the world to do this (Score:2)
Or does he envision a hulking vanadium redox battery filling up every suburban backyard?
His vision is fine, but .... (Score:2)
I don't like the way he wants to only sell his products to compel purchasers to participate in it.
The Tesla PowerWall is really nice, and by many counts, is the best looking and performing option for "whole house battery storage" on the market today. (I looked at a few other contenders before and last I checked, they didn't have as much capacity, among other things.)
I don't necessarily want to buy Tesla's solar panels though, just to get a PowerWall! At my last house, I already spent a lot of money for a S
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he's more interested in selling everyone the packages so he can ensure the whole thing will network together
As a goal, that makes sense. But you wouldn't need a wholly integrated system for this; solar panels (including the Tesla ones) are pretty dumb; the Powerwall would be handling the smart part, and you could have pretty much any PV setup feed into that.
Artificially locking out end user choice. (Score:2)
Dumb on an intergalactic scale.
It alienates both would be buyers and vendors.
Not the first to float the idea (Score:2)
I wouldn't be surprised if this becomes quite common over time with people hooking their cars up to house and the house and car form a symbiosis based on their power consumption needs and the panels on the house.
Power, is the new Cable (Score:2)
[The future]
Telsa will find that few can afford a $100K+ power setup, and his recent tactic of comes-in-a-kit-only product offering, will force him to start offering his product for "free" in order to roll it out en masse.
Tesla will put themselves in between you and the electric company (kit mandate) while bundling it with a "Slash your bill in half TODAY!" sales gimmick. They'll start starving the electric companies out of revenue, and negotiate a fraction of what you were paying before. Then, when the T
Vendor lock in? (Score:2)
So, basically one can't buy solar panels from Tesla and batteries from other vendors or the reverse, or am I missing something?
Go right ahead (Score:2)
Sure, I'm fine with Tesla making my home a power plant. ...As long as they pay for it, and fix my roof if it starts leaking.
Re:News at 11 (Score:5, Insightful)
This is more about making musk more money than it is about reducing greenhouse gasses
If he accomplishes the latter, he deserves the former.
Re: (Score:2)
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If he didn't exist, the people buying Teslas would have bought or driven gasoline cars .. that would have increased pollution. The carbon credits are worth it.
Re: (Score:2)
Not the highly debunked "electric cars get their fuel from fossil fuels" BS. First off it depends where you live -- many places get their electricity from nuclear or hydro and nowadays many get it from wind and solar. Speaking of solar, that's the whole point of getting a solar roof. If there were no electric cars, you be forced to use fossil fuel even if you had rooftop solar at home. Second, if you don't live in a place that have nuclear or hydro .. a fossil fuel power plant is more efficient than a car e
Re: News at 11 (Score:2)
Ok, well he deserves to be. Nobody the hell else is making my life better by producing an electric car that is indisputably 10x safer than average. Nobody else is helping me get rid of dependency on rip-off utility companies. Nobody else cares about ensuring I have internet access from anywhere in the world. So yeah if it is to help him become a trillionaire I do not care, I am getting mines out of it too.
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Your point being?